Businesses that rely on standard terrestrial networks are hamstrung by technology that was not designed for point-to-multipoint applications. In a terrestrial network, in order to send a message to 1,000 recipients, the message must be sent separately 1,000 times, thereby consuming valuable bandwidth and server resources. Even if bandwidth is available, there is no guarantee that the message will be delivered simultaneously to all destinations, let alone be delivered at all, because each message travels on a separate physical path.
Using satellite IP multicasting, one copy of the data is multicast via a satellite to an unlimited number of destination devices, thereby saving bandwidth and server resources. As the number of destination devices increase bandwidth savings multiply. A satellite's inherent broadcast capabilities guarantee that all destination devices receive the data simultaneously.
Multicast services provide a single source with an ability to transmit data to multiple destinations. Multicast services also include providing multiple sources with an ability to transmit data to multiple destinations (i.e., multipoint-to-multipoint). Videoconferencing, in which each participant can be considered as a single source transmitting to multiple participants in a videoconference, is an example of multipoint-to-multipoint multicast services.
An existing satellite network was deployed with Internet Protocol (IP) multicast services. However, the existing satellite network does not deliver each multicast stream via multiple spot beams served by one or more satellite gateway earth stations.